Google paid $380 million to buy Diane Greene's company so she could become its cloud chief

Google’s umbrella company, Alphabet, today disclosed that it paid
$380.2 million to buy Bebop, the startup from VMware cofounder
and former chief executive Diane Greene.

Greene, who sits on Alphabet’s board of directors and is now in
charge of Google’s cloud businesses as a result of the
acquisition, isn’t keeping a huge percentage of the money Bebop
is receiving as a result of the deal. In fact, she’s giving it up
to charity.

“Diane Greene exchanged 7,244,150 shares of bebop stock for
200,729 shares of Alphabet Class C Capital Stock at $740.39 each
in the Merger, plus cash for fractional shares,” Alphabet said in
the filing it submitted to today to the U.S.
Securities and Exchange Commission. “Ms. Greene intends to donate
the shares exchanged to a donor advised fund.” The total comes
out to some $148.6 million.

Multiple reports have indicated that following the acquisition,
Bebop is continuing to work on its “development platform that
makes it easy to build and maintain enterprise applications,” as
Google chief executive Sundar Pichai described it in his blog post on the deal. And sure enough,
today’s filing notes that Bebop “was merged into an indirect
wholly-owned subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.” In other words, it
hasn’t been subsumed into the greater Google.

But Greene’s new role at Google means that the company well known
in Web search and online advertising now has a seasoned
enterprise software veteran who knows how to sell to big
companies. That’s important as Google takes on Amazon Web
Services and Microsoft Azure in the cloud business. Time will
tell how much traction the Google public cloud can gain in 2016
and beyond — and how much Bebop turns into a major business
within the greater Alphabet.